I was
collecting a list of WWPNs for a bunch of new AIX LPARs I was installing from
scratch. There were two ways I could find the WWPN for a virtual Fibre Channel
adapter on a new LPAR i.e. one that did not yet have an operating system
installed.

I started by
checking the LPAR properties from the HMC (as shown below).

To speed
things up I moved to the HMC command line tool, lssyscfg, to display the
WWPNs (as shown below).

I gave these
WWPNS to my SAN administrator so that he could manually “zone in” the LPARs on
the SAN switches and allocate storage to each. He then, half-jokingly said,
“Gee, it would be nice if you could insert the colons into the WWPNS for me! J”. Of course, this got me thinking and
after a few minutes of playing with sed, I came up with a way to do this
quickly.

# cat lpar1_wwpns.txt | sed
's/../&:/g;s/:$//'

c0:50:76:03:a2:92:00:7c

c0:50:76:03:a2:92:00:7e

c0:50:76:03:a2:92:00:78

c0:50:76:03:a2:92:00:7a

Now my list
of WWPNs was ready to be cut’n’paste by my SAN admin. He was happy.

A colleague of mine contacted me during the week to ask how one could
determine if a POWER7 system was capable of Active Memory Expansion. I thought
I'd share my response with everyone who follows my blog.

You can check if the system is capable of providing Active Memory
Expansion (AME), from the HMC command line using the lssyscfg command, as shown here:hscroot@hmc1:~>
lssyscfg -r sys -m Server-8233-E8B-SN1000 -F active_mem_expansion_capable1

Alternatively you can view the capabilities of
the managed system from the HMC GUI, under System properties/Capabilities, as
shown in the following image.

Once you’ve concluded that your POWER7 system is
AME capable, the next step is to check if AME is enabled or disabled for
an LPAR. This is easily done from the AIX command line with the lparstat and/or amepat commands, as shown in the following example:;Running
lparstat and amepat on a LPAR with AME
disabled.

Note
that I deliberately ran these commands as a non-root user to highlight the fact
that you don’t need root access to ascertain whether or not AME is active on an
LPAR.

By the
way, did you know that AME is now supported in SAP production environments running
on AIX and POWER7? Both SAP application servers, as well as database servers
running DB2 LUW are supported. Unfortunately there’s no support for LPARs with
Oracle RDBMS at this stage. Thanks to George Manousos from IBM Australia for
providing me with this update.

As AME is not
recommended with large page support, AME
will disable AIX

64KB pages by default.

AME monitoring
capability in CCMS

Monitoring
capabilities are available with saposcol v12.46 for more details see SAP note
710975.

It looks as
though SAP have been quick to support AME on AIX/POWER7. This is a great
benefit to SAP customers running with PowerVM on the IBM POWER platform. The
following screenshot shows the SAP CCMS with AME statistics being reported.

The SAP AIX porting team continues
in further improving the integration of PowerVM into SAP system monitoring. While
in the past already most processor and AIX virtualization metrics could be
monitored via CCMS, now POWER7 Active Memory Expansion (AME) has been
included. Customers will find a new memory section in the respective
CCMS-panel as depicted in this screen shot.

For those
who are not familiar with what AME actually is and how it can benefit you, I
suggest you take a look at the IBM AME Wiki site first: